Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Today we had a weird error on our SharePoint 2010 production farm: clicking on help got the "help content cannot be displayed" error for all normal sites, even though it worked perfectly well in Central Admin. The same applied to Site Settings>Help Settings for the site-collection, it worked in Central Admin, but not in any other site. In addition, the 'SharePoint Foundation Search' service was running on one WFE server.

First I checked all settings in KB939313 without that fixing the problem, then I checked the log files and found this access denied error for our site's app-pool account:

Before embarking on changing any database rights, we decided to test with an English site just in case, as all our custom site definitions are in Norwegian. Lo and behold - help worked for the new team-site; and what's more, suddenly help was working for all our existing Norwegian LCID 1044 sites also. Go figure...

[UPDATE] See the comments for tips on granting execute rights on the sprocs listed in the ULS to fix this problem once and for all - even beyond IISRESET.